With Microsoft’s Imagine Cup world finals in full swing in St. Petersburg, Russia, a few interesting statistics about the annual competition have been revealed. While there are over 10 African teams competing for the grand prize, over 70 countries in total have representation.

Winners from last year's event celebrate (image: Microsoft)

“For the past decade, Imagine Cup students have created technology applications from software to video games to mobile apps designed to solve some of the world’s biggest problems, in the areas of education, healthcare, the environment and more.

This year, Imagine Cup expanded to encourage even more students to apply their creativity by building apps that deliver technology innovations that advance user experiences in categories such as social networks, search, classifieds, online shopping or games — or that create entirely new categories the world hasn’t even imagined.”

IT News Africa will be following the African teams throughout the competition and will track their progress.

By the numbers:

* Active Participants: More than 25,000

* Participation increase from 2012: More than 70%

* Students at Worldwide Finals: 309

* Countries Represented: 71

* Teams in the competition: 87

* Desktop, Device & Cloud: 36% of teams used Windows, Windows Phone and Windows Azure together, crossing platforms and devices to show how software can make hardware more interesting.

* A Medical Kinection: Nearly 40% of World Citizenship teams created innovative ways to use technology in the medical field, with more than half of those using the Kinect SDK.

* Coming Soon to an App Store Near You: 38 teams created a Windows Store app that is or will soon be available for download.

* Enhancing Quality of Life: 15 teams used Microsoft technologies in projects that monitor the well-being of people and things in real time, such as heart rate, sun exposure and bee hive health.

* Gaming on the Windows OS: 90% of Games teams created games for the Windows OS, showing the PC as a popular gaming platform for young developer.